When 2025 America tuned into HBO’s award-winning series The Pitt, we showed we’re seeking authenticity.

As someone who works at the intersection of health and invention and built their life around the creation of direct social impact, I see the show for what it is: a brutally honest portrayal of the intrinsic tragedy in our health care system. And an opportunity.

The Pitt’s unflinching portrayal of time, talent, and organizational politics is a catalyst for conversation. While the drama accurately diagnoses the problems with health care today, it misses a critical part of the solution: artificial intelligence. Not as a panacea, but as a collaborator. It’s The Pitt’s missing character.

AI isn’t here to replace people.

In conversations about AI in health care, the pendulum tends to swing between two extreme positions: it’s either going to save us, or it’s going to replace us. Both are false.

Humans do not scale. Clinicians are already stretched thin, racing against clocks for more patients with fewer resources. We’re facing a projected shortage of up to 122,000 physicians, including shortages in nine out of ten surgical specialties by 2032. Considering that 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65 each day and seniors generate 34 percent of inpatient procedures, we can’t possibly scale the physician workforce fast enough to meet this demand.

We must redirect what we cannot do alone. To scale, we must innovate.

Innovation is not just about developing cutting-edge technologies but also about understanding the complex landscape of health care and addressing the needs of patients and medical professionals equally. It’s a commitment to staying ahead of the curve, anticipating societal needs, and collaborating to drive progress. It requires being comfortable with the unknown, and not being intimidated by new tools, but empowered by them.

Preserving expertise isn’t a plot.

Surgeons rely on years of training, instinct, and pattern recognition to make rapid decisions in high-stakes environments. Despite their expertise, they face the ongoing challenge of recalling extensive medical knowledge while performing complex, physically and mentally demanding procedures.

With the support of the right technology, this deep experience can be captured and transformed into structured, searchable knowledge. Tools that collect real-time surgical data, track procedural changes, and feed insights back into the system can help build an evolving knowledge base—one that endures and remains accessible even after individual clinicians leave the field.

Studies indicate that intelligent guidance systems can reduce surgery time by 20 to 80 minutes and lower the likelihood of costly revisions. These technologies are not designed to replace human expertise but to extend it—reducing cognitive load, anticipating potential complications, and allowing healthcare professionals to focus on delivering high-quality care.

Co-creation isn’t just style.

The characters in The Pitt are burned out because they’re constantly battling systems that haven’t been designed around their workflows. Tools, introduced without relevant input from the people who will use them. That’s how we end up with cumbersome EHRs, redundant charting, and clinical workflows that create more work instead of less.

Advancement must be shaped by the people using it, like the surgeons in the OR, the nurses on the floor, and the residents charting late at night. If we build with them, not just for them, we have a genuine opportunity for meaningful change.

The alternative is more documentation, screens, and burnout. This is precisely what The Pitt laid bare.

The time is now.

The show’s final message is urgency: We’re running out of time. But I’d argue we’re also running out of excuses. The technology exists. The partnerships are growing. What we need now is the collective will to embrace a new paradigm: one where AI doesn’t overshadow expertise but elevates it. Let’s make sure the next season of health care innovation is one worth watching. Write the AI character into the storyline. Now.

Gabe Jones is a health care executive.